Teachers are overpaid.

[Kaitlyn]

BlinkingDuck said

• Teaching is a part time job. I know this one used to drive me nuts because I would hear it when I was teaching but it is true/appearance is true. The appearance is that teachers get huge amount of vacation days and they do! No amount of explaining that teachers work 12 hour days and doing math to show teachers work close or at 40 hrs*52 weeks a year will cut it because most people actually have to show up those 52, 40 hour weeks and many times work over 40 hours while getting only 10 days(!) off while they see teachers get off 70-80. So, saying you put in your 2080 hours per year will just get you a ‘yeah, right’ from the public. Teaching needs to become a full time, 52 weeks a year position in order to lose this very powerful, low salary argument.

A full-time job is one in which workers work a minimum of 32 hours per week. Teachers typically are required to be at school from 8:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., a total of 37.5 hours per week. Teaching is a full-time job. Time off in summer? If I don’t work in the summer, I don’t get paid in the summer. This is not a vacation, it is seasonal unemployment.

• People who don’t benefit directly pay most of the bill. Childless, older with grown children, etc. people pay property tax for education. They don’t DIRECTLY benefit (I know, I know, many arguments that they indirectly benefit) so they just want to keep costs low and don’t care about quality so much. If only parents footed the bill, they would most likely take more of a role.

1. More than 90% of the population was educated in public shools. They recieved a direct benefit for which they did not at the time pay. This is how social institutions work.

2. Everyone benefits from good public schools. The majority of people you work with or encounter was educated in public schools. Men with a poor education are more likely to commit violent crimes, father illegitemate children, abuse girlfriends, spouses and children and women with a poor education are more likely to bear children as teens–usually out of wedlock–abuse their children, stay with an abusive husband/boyfriend, and be on welfare.

3. That said, I agree that the chief reason that teachers are not paid better is that taxpayers are unwilling to pay more. Its as simple as that.

• Education degrees are a disaster. I know, I used to teach college and it is the norm that math edec degree seekers don’t even take many (if any at all) junior level math courses, let alone senior level. The courses that would count for a B.S. degree in math. I helped a couple of Biz ed majors and it was the same. Education degrees are way to watered down and they attact the low end of the college class. A stat I heard while teaching was that 50% of teachers graduate in the lowest 25% of the college class (sorry, no cite, and its 10 years old now anyway).

1. That depends on the college. I graduated with a 4.0 from a school that only admits one out of every ten applicants. There are good education programs and bad ones.

2. Had you read my previous posts, you would have seen that I am fully in favor of raising the standards for getting into education programs and for being a teacher.

3. Why do you think teaching doesn’t attract more of the top math, science, and business majors? Most wouldn’t even consider a teaching job because of the money. Raise salaries, and you attract more of the top students, and education programs can be more selective.

• Teaching is not governed by their own. You cannot be promoted to higher and higher levels of teaching and do significantly higher level tasks. If you want to get ‘promoted’, then you almost need to leave classroom teaching and their is no ‘promotion path’.

1. Teachers are evaluated by other education professionals. In my case, I am evaluated yearly by my principal. As a probationary teacher, I was evaluated by my principal, assistant principal, and two peer evaluators. As a lead teacher, I now evaluate other probationary teachers. If that is not “teaching governed by their own”, then I must have misunderstood you.

2. Teaching, unlike business, is not arranged in a large number or ranks through which one is promoted. I agree. So?

• Someone mentioned that teaching is tax funded resulting in lower pay.

That was me. I maintain that this is the primary reason teachers are not paid more.

Experienced being replaced by inexperienced: Yes, a doctor and other professions are replaced all the time but what I was getting at was that if you replace an extremely competent heart surgeon with someone inexperienced to operate on me, I may DIE. This is a result people tend to notice. If you replace an experienced teacher with someone incompetent, almost everyone will not notice. Sure, it would be terrible for the students and the school, but to Joe taxpayer? Nah.

1. Good heart surgeons earn every cent they make. Hell, even mediocre heart surgeons earn every cent they make. They work hard for their large salaries, and posses a specialized skill very that is very rare. Replacing an experienced surgeon with an inexperienced is a big loss. I agree. But new, inexperienced surgeons invariably stay in their profession for a long time, because the profession has great tangible rewards (money), and for some, even greater intangible rewards (job satisfaction, respect, etc.)

2. Experience in teaching is a vital part of what makes one a good teacher. When you replace a teacher with 20 years experience with a new graduate, the students have lost the benefit of all that experience. Is it as noticable as the hospital who has lost a great surgeon? I think that, to the administration, the faculty, the students, and the parents, it is just as noticiable.

3. The problem is that teacheres with a great deal of experience are retiring, but new teachers are not staying in the profession long enough to gain that level of experience. About half of all teachers leave the profession at about the 4th or 5th year. Usually they leave for a job that pays more. If teachers were paid the same as other professions that require the same level of education, this would not happen. The number of experienced teachers goes down every year, primarily because of the money.

My one vs many: If your work benefits many, you will TEND to be paid less. This is because many will need to pay your salary and, like journalism, I am not willing to pay more for my newspaper in order to support local journalists because I don’t see the benefit. I DO benefit, but the benefit is spread over many people while if I’m up on a murder charge, a good lawyer only benefits me and will determine how I spend the rest of my life – so I’m willing to shell out the big bucks which goes directly to the lawyer.

A rock star who sells more tickets benefits more people, and thus makes more money. The same goes for a writer, magician, athlete, or any other entertainer. The more clients a criminal defense lawyer defends in a year, the more money he makes. A heart surgeon who does 50 bypass operations in a year will make more money than one who does only one. The more customers a store owner has, the more money he makes. McDonald’s is the most profitable restaurant chain in the world because it serves the most people. Newspapers and magazines that sell more papers, thus benefitting more people, make more money, and pay thier reporters higher salaries. As a general rule, the more people your work benefits, the more money you earn. This is a truism of business in a free-market economy. Even in your own example, serving more people means more money. In any case, this is really a side issue, because all of these examples are based on supply and demand–free market principals.

But education is not based on free-market principals; it is a socialized institution. Thus, salaries are not determined by supply-and-demand, but by what taxpayers are willing to pay. And because salaries have not increased as fast as job qualifications, people are more likely to choose other professions because they can make more money.

Baseball players are not a good example because they are not easily replaced. 1% better on the field may make the difference between going all the way while a 1% better teacher will be mostly unnoticable.

1. Baseball players are easily replaced. There is a vast network of minor league players. For every major leaguer, there are ten minor leaguers who would be willing and able take his place. True, in many cases the replacement would be of lesser quality, but your argument was that being easily replaced results in lower pay. I provided a counter-example.

2. I think what you mean is that professional baseball players are not easily replaced with players of equal ability. If that is what you meant, I agree whole-heartedly. But that is exactly my point. Experienced, highly-skilled teachers may be easily (though at present, this is not the case) replaced, but not with teachers of equal ability.

3. 1% makes a big difference on the field? Not by my figures. For a good hitter, a 1% improvement would mean 2 more hits and no more home runs per year. For a good feilder, a 1% improvement would mean no difference in the number of errors each year. 1% would make no noticable difference on the field.

Much of this is off point. Let me summarize my main points.

1. There is a teacher shortage and it is getting worse. Many districts start the year with unqualified people teaching because there were not enough qualified applicants to fill the vacancies.

2. Most new teachers are leaving the profession within 5 years, usually for jobs that pay more. This leads to a shortage of experienced teachers.

3. The best math, science, and business students are less likely to choose education as a major, partly because they can easily make more money in other jobs.

4. Teacher salaries have increased, but not at the same rate that requirements have increased. In some states, to get an ongoing credential, a Master’s degree is required.

5. Everyone wants to improve education.

It’s simple. If you want more applicants for a given job, you either raise compensation or lower standards. If you want better applicants for a given job, you raise standards. If you want better applicants and more applicants, you have to raise standards and increase compensation. That means more money. For a more detailed explanation, read points 5 and 6 that I quoted in my last post.

[Sterra]

The main problem with teachers is theres no way to accurately guage their performance. Good grades? They make the grades for their students. What I think is my best teacher has gotten his resignation asked for and has at various times been reprimanded for his behavior. He however has taught me more useful information than any other 2 teachers combined.

The current teachers union just doesen’t want to lose its teamsters I think:)

[Sam_Stone]

The reason good teachers leave teaching is because they hit a pinnacle of salary and have no real hope for significantly improving that. And good people are generally self-motivated and therefore are constantly working to provide a better life for themselves and their families.

This happens in Nursing as well, which shares many of the same characteristics as teaching. It’s union controlled, and taxpayer funded. The egalitarian mindset of the union prevents merit pay.

Around here, a graduate nurse with a 2-year diploma starts at about $45,000. That’s WAY too high, IMO. At the same time, people graduating with 4-year physics degrees and going into research are earning about $10,000 less. (If this all sounds really high to some of you, remember that this is Canadian money).

However, nursing salaries used to cap out at about $55,000. Which means that a person only has a $10,000 possible increase in income over their entire career. My wife is in her early 30’s, and hit the top rank of nursing salaries about 3 years ago. So what happens? Well, the lazy nurses stick around, because it’s hard to fire them out of a union position. The good ones don’t get paid any more than the lousy ones, no matter how good a job they do. And after So the good ones leave, the bad ones stay. And even if the good ones stay, a few years at a flat salary starts making them edgy and looking for reasons to hit the road.

Tie pay to merit. Reduce starting salaries, and move the money to the upper end. Set up a system whereby great teachers can be rewarded, and you’ll get more quality people moving into teaching as a career choice.

[DoctorJ]

Here in Kentucky, we have a system in which students are tested each year, goals are set for the following years, and schools are judged based on how well they met them. Those schools that do very well are “in rewards”, and get money. Those who do very poorly are judged “in crisis”, and can be essentially taken over by the state. The state sends in “experts” to make any changes they feel necessary, up to and including the firing of tenured teachers and administrators.

My mother is in her 25th year of teaching middle school. She was in charge of the writing portfolios that made up a large part of this testing. They had a long way to go this year to meet their goals, and she busted her ass to get those kids and their writing up to speed. She stayed after school for at least an hour every day just for that purpose, on top of whatever else she had to stay for. She put in nights and weekends, which I never saw her do when I was at home. Anyway, it paid off–the school was in rewards.

Now the question is what to do with the reward money. The teachers feel they deserve bonuses–after all, they would have caught hell if it had gone the other way, so they should be rewarded. The principal, however, is opposed to the idea–he feels the money should go for “the kids”, including a program to purchase palmtop computers for the kids to take home to work on their writing. (That, to me, is one of those ideas that sounds wonderful in theory, but is unimaginably stupid in reality. I baby my Visor, and it only took about four months to crack the screen.)

The school board has said that the money need not go to the school; if the school has projects that are worth funding, they say, they have the money to fund them. Even so, the principal is opposed to giving any of the money to the teachers. Mom says it’s a combination of his own misguided altruism and his desire to not piss off any parents.

Mom has been teaching for 25 years and makes about as much as the low end starting salary for an engineer. Teachers starting out with a Master’s make about $23K a year there. They are scrambling every year to fill their vacant teaching spots, and the ones they do hire are unqualified. If they really want to do something “for the kids”, they can start treating teachers as if they’re a little more valuable–which would start by paying them more.

Dr. J

[BlinkingDuck]

Good morning!

Number 6,

I would like to start out by with what we agree. The big ones are that teachers work in a socialistic environment not allowing market forces to work, teacher standards need to be raised significantly and that woefully underprepared teachers are being thrown into the classroom.

I agree that market forces should be allowed to work. It won’t be that simple because schools will just hire anyone and let them stand in the classroom. Market forces need to be allowed to work WITH QUALIFIED TEACHERS ONLY. If schools can’t just hire anybody (emergency acts or whatever), teacher salaries will move up. They HAVE to because they need to hire teachers or no school! Eventually when salaries get up there, more qualified people will enter teaching and a balance of supply/demand will be acheived. Unfortunately, this will not happen since the public/schools want to keep costs low so they will just keep hiring less and less qualified people.

Teacher standards should be raised so that a math teacher actually has a math degree for heavens sake! I have seen masters of math education people who have never taken a junior level undergraduate MATH course! Pathetic. This will increase teacher quality and create more teacher demand by weeding out low quality raw material.

Others:

• You mentioned time off. Your right, it is seasonal unemployment. I laughed heartily when I read that becasue when I taught I used exactly those words. People would have sympathy until they found out I was a teacher. My point is though, that it is still unemployment therefore teachers are not working full time! Teaching needs to become ‘full-time’ meaning no seasonal unemployment. People attracted to seasonal unemployment will not be of the same caliber career-wise then ones that are not. It just doesn’t seem that ‘serious’ an occupation.

• I knew you would bring up indirect benefits of good teaching and I agree with you. However, people without kids are just not going to care as much about schools then people with kids. Gramps doesn’t want to raise jis taxes because he wants more money to blow in Las Vegas or something. Somethng needs to be done with how schools are financed so that those that benefit more (right now, present day) feel more responsible to how their money is being spent.

• You keep bringing up sports/rock analogies and I feel they are faulty. Baseball players are not easily replaced, with same quality. If they were, there would be no obscene $125 million dollar contracts. An extra few hits a year could mean the world series. Rock stars make obscene money because they made it. People want to throw large amounts of money at them. I don’t see the relation to teaching… Think about journalism, or social work or police.

• Lead teachers may evaluate probationary teachers, but do lead teachers decide who and how much raises are given? No, admin does that, and they don’t teach.

• Yes, it is a crime that experienced teachers are canned and replaced by cheaper, inexperienced teachers. You would have a hard time doing that with doctors, lawyers, and even my position, but it can be done with teachers pretty easily. You might even get a better teacher since the experienced one could be burned out dealing with the low salaries and crap while the younger is still full of enthusiasm. When all that is drained, can him and get another younger teacher… (dripping sarcasm, but believe this is done.

Need to get to work,

Blink

BTW, Sum Stone is right about capping early. The reason that it happens is that the field has a skill set that needs to be learned but once learned experience is not as important. Salaries don’t rise much beyond ‘entry’ level since there is a ready ‘supply’ of qualified labor.

[puddleglum]

I am all for teacher’s salaries being bigger since it would benefit me personally. However I thought the numbers were a little off. I think if you are comparing teaching to babysitting you should only count the time teachers are actually with the kids. In my county teachers teach 5 fifty minute classes with two planning periods and a twenty minute break for lunch. And in most grades 30 students per class is too high, 25 is more average. So if my math is right that breaks down to 56,250 a year. But remember there are support faculty to pay as well. If we assume that they would get about one third of the money and we give the teacher the other two thirds that would leave them with 37,125. That is about what a teacher makes in my county after about 6 or 7 years. Also babysitters do not have a health plan or retirement benefits which in my county is very generous. So relative to babysitters they are not doing so bad.

[BlinkingDuck]

Puddlegum, I find your post insulting and I don’t even teach anymore! The OP was being sarcastic to make a point. Teaching is NOT babysitting! It is an extremely important position that has low status, respect and salary and when I hear comments that a teacher that has 6-7 years experience should only make a third of what babysitters make it makes me glad I left teaching so I don’t have to deal with you.

I don’t have to deal with people like you when I want to get married and raise a family and be told that I shouldn’t be getting married because your kids are my family. That I should be paid little so that I teach because I love it and not the pay – Choose your next surgeon by that logic! To be yelled at for leaving teaching since I am putting my needs above the needs of the children, nevermind that I will be making 2.4 times (TIMES!!!) my teaching salary the day I left teaching (Excuse me, it is YOUR fault you’re losing a good teacher, not mine since you should have paid me a reasonable wage). I don’t have to listen to your twisted logic about why I am making THE SAME SALARY 5 YEARS after I started which is really a pay cut because inflation ran 4-5% each year. Yadda Yadda Etc an so on.

Sorry, this is more of a vent but I am SO glad I left teaching. Best decision of my life…

[Sam_Stone]

You can’t get away from the fact that teachers get the summer off. That should make a big difference in salary. If a teacher gets paid $35,000 for 9 months work, that’s an equivalent annual salary of $46,000.

Whether that teacher chooses to do part-time work or not during that time is a personal choice.

A friend of mine teaches computer science at a local college. I work as a software developer, and make about $20K more than he does. He was complaining about the salary one day, and I asked him why he didn’t take consulting contracts during those three months? That would easily bring his salary up to where mine is. The answer? He likes the time off. That’s his choice, and it’s fine. But that also explains why he should and does earn less money than I do.

And don’t forget that even if you aren’t working during those months, you’re saving on all the work-related expenses (transportation, clothing, meals, etc). And, during those three months you can do work around the home that others would have to pay for, you can take summer classes and upgrade your skills, etc.

Any way you look at it, getting that much time off every year is a MAJOR benefit, and has to be factored in to any salary discussions.

[Tennessee_Ben]

I’d like to make a point that has been touched on tangentially, but not really fleshed out thus far.

There is something fundamentally flawed in arguing that teachers are underpaid. Some teachers–including many that I have been lucky enough to have–are underpaid, but others, paid at the same rate, are grossly–and I mean grossly–overpaid. And there’s no meaningful way, as I understand it, to correct for this disparity in quality within a school district.

Put another way, if I argued that all middle managers were underpaid, the idea would be laughable, presumably because private sector employees are paid in accordance with their individual merit. But teacher pay doesn’t seem to be merit based. The same system that keeps great teachers from making any dough is also the system that keeps lousy, dim-witted teachers in jobs (and the primary reason that many people are reluctant to pour more money into the educational system as it now exists)

The problem with (or great thing about, depending on how you look at it) merit-based pay is that it requires oversight and evaluation. As I remember high school, there were almost never observers in our classes. Imagine any private sector employee going a year at a time with no feedback about nor inquiry into the quality of his work. Again, laughable. So why should this hold for teachers?

I understand that implementing such a system would require drastic changes to the American education system, but why not? We now have a system where the teachers aren’t happy and the students (from some indications) aren’t learning.

Oh, and add me to the list of people who (1) would love to teach, (2) would be great at it, and (3) would never consider it as a profession because the pay is inadequate.

Respectfully,
Tenn-Ben

[Sam_Stone]

I don’t buy the notion that there is something special about teachers that makes it hard or impossible to determine merit. I think most school principles have a pretty good sense of who the good and bad teachers are. And there are lots of objective measurements - amount of time spent on extra-curricular activities, grades of children, performance of that teacher’s kid in the NEXT year’s class with another teacher, being on time, professional appearance, professional behaviour, surveys of students, education and grades of the teacher, etc.

There are plenty of jobs out there that are merit-based and also a lot harder to objectively quantify than teaching.

How about testing TEACHERS? Lots of other occupations require periodic testing and re-training. At GE, I’ve already had to attend three different training courses in the last year, and this was a light year for such things.

I once had a social studies teacher who was teaching WWII history, and did not know that the U.S. and Japan were at war. She just thought it was a small skirmish. I’ve had math teachers who knew less math than I did at the time. After going to university and seeing some of the people who were in the faculty of education, it all made sense. Where I went to school, education and Phys-ed were the faculties you wound up in if you were either too lazy or stupid to make it in anything tougher.

Another thing that needs to be fixed in teaching - the ‘faddish’ nature of much teaching theory, a lot of which is not based on anything scientific. A lot of schools waste a lot of resources grabbing onto the latest education trend without really studying it. When I was in grade school, our Principle became a convert of the ‘open classroom’ concept. So the school spent a bundle tearing out a bunch of interior walls and re-designing classrooms. A few years later, that went out of vogue, and the school spent a fortune building all those interior walls up again.

This goes on all the time in schools. It’s ironic that the management of schools is so non-scientific and ad-hoc.

[Kaitlyn]

BlinkingDuck said
I agree that market forces should be allowed to work. It won’t be that simple because schools will just hire anyone and let them stand in the classroom. Market forces need to be allowed to work WITH QUALIFIED TEACHERS ONLY. If schools can’t just hire anybody (emergency acts or whatever), teacher salaries will move up. They HAVE to because they need to hire teachers or no school! Eventually when salaries get up there, more qualified people will enter teaching and a balance of supply/demand will be acheived. Unfortunately, this will not happen since the public/schools want to keep costs low so they will just keep hiring less and less qualified people.

Schools would love to hire only fully credentialed teachers. There are not enough to go around, primarily because people choose other professions or leave teaching because of the money. I think we should raise standards, but that will only serve to drive people into more lucrative professions. As I have written before, I think we should raise standards and salaries.

Teacher standards should be raised so that a math teacher actually has a math degree for heavens sake! I have seen masters of math education people who have never taken a junior level undergraduate MATH course! Pathetic. This will increase teacher quality and create more teacher demand by weeding out low quality raw material.

I absolutely agree, and would add that the same should apply to science and business. Of course, when you increase the demand for these teachers, you must also increase the supply of teachers to meet the demand. You do this by paying them a competative salary.

• You mentioned time off. Your right, it is seasonal unemployment. I laughed heartily when I read that becasue when I taught I used exactly those words. People would have sympathy until they found out I was a teacher. My point is though, that it is still unemployment therefore teachers are not working full time! Teaching needs to become ‘full-time’ meaning no seasonal unemployment. People attracted to seasonal unemployment will not be of the same caliber career-wise then ones that are not. It just doesn’t seem that ‘serious’ an occupation.

The difference between full-time and part-time has nothing to do with seasonal unemployment. Full-time employees are those who work 32 hours a week while they are employed. There is no argument here. Teaching is a full-time job.

That said, I agree, school should be year round. But if you increase a teachers’ working year from 40 weeks to 48 weeks (a 20% increase) you should be prepared to give them a 20% increase in compensation.

Baseball players are not easily replaced, with same quality.

Good baseball players are not easily replaced with players of the same quality. I said the same thing. The same is true of good teachers.

• Rock stars make obscene money because they made it. People want to throw large amounts of money at them. I don’t see the relation to teaching… Think about journalism, or social work or police.

I wasn’t making an analogy to rock stars, just using them as one example out of many to make the point that the more people your work benefits, the more you get paid. Bruce Springsteen makes millions because he entertains millions. Most rock musicians get paid very little because they entertain relatively few people. This illustrates my point: the more people your work benefits, the more you get paid–most of the time.

The same is true of writers, lawyers, doctors, small business owners, franchise owners, inventors, builders, plumbers, ditch diggers. The more customers, clients, fans, etc., the more people you can get to buy whatever it is you are selling, the more money you make. Making more money by serving fewer people is the exception.

Social workers, police, and teachers are all among the lowest paid professionals. These are all socialized institutions. Taxpayers don’t want to pay them more. I have been saying this is the main cause all along.

Journalists’ income is based on how many readers they serve. Those who are syndicated into hundreds of papers (Roger Ebert, George Will, Ann Landers) make a lot more money than those who work for a single paper. Larger papers pay more than smaller ones. Serve more people, get paid more.

• Lead teachers may evaluate probationary teachers, but do lead teachers decide who and how much raises are given? No, admin does that, and they don’t teach.

Who gets raises and how big they are is determined by a set salary schedule. The salary schedule is set up by the superintendant and financial officers of the school district, in negotiation with the teachers’ union in states that have teachers’ unions. That said, evaluations do have an effect on which teachers get tenure, and which do not.

• Yes, it is a crime that experienced teachers are canned and replaced by cheaper, inexperienced teachers. You would have a hard time doing that with doctors, lawyers, and even my position, but it can be done with teachers pretty easily. You might even get a better teacher since the experienced one could be burned out dealing with the low salaries and crap while the younger is still full of enthusiasm. When all that is drained, can him and get another younger teacher… (dripping sarcasm, but believe this is done.

Schools may do a some foolish things, but replacing good, experienced teachers with novices to save money isn’t one of them. Such teachers are treasured, and the crime is when they leave for better-paying jobs. The solution is to pay them what they’re worth.

Besides, it isn’t necessary to get rid of teachers to create openings because half of all teachers leave the profession at about the 4th or 5th year, often to take a higher-paying job. How do we keep them? Pay them more.

Sam Stone said
The reason good teachers leave teaching is because they hit a pinnacle of salary and have no real hope for significantly improving that. And good people are generally self-motivated and therefore are constantly working to provide a better life for themselves and their families.

Bingo!

You can’t get away from the fact that teachers get the summer off. That should make a big difference in salary. If a teacher gets paid $35,000 for 9 months work, that’s an equivalent annual salary of $46,000.

1. 10 months of work. I’ve worked for three different districts, always on a 10-month contract. This does not take into account the two weeks of my own time that it takes to prepare for the school year.

2. My district pays roughly $2700 for summer school, so if you want to figure “equivilent annual salary” it comes to $37,700 per year for a teacher who teaches the whole year.

3. Unemployment is unemployment. It doesn’t magically make the money you earned while you were working worth more. In my district, there are always more teachers who apply for summer-school than there are openings. This is not a vacation, this is being unemployed because there is no work available.

4. As I said above, I am fully in favor of making the regular school-year year round (lengthen it by about 20%). But it should be accompanied by an equivilent increase in salary.

And don’t forget that even if you aren’t working during those months, you’re saving on all the work-related expenses (transportation, clothing, meals, etc).

Food and clothing become less expensive when you’re unemployed? Wow! Personally, my meals and clothes cost just as much regardless of whether I’m working. You’ve got me on the transportation, though. I could save a good $50 per month on transportaion if I din’t have to drive to work
for the two months in the summer. But then I’d lose the $2700 I’d make teaching summer school. Not much of a trade-off.

And, during those three months you can do work around the home that others would have to pay for, you can take summer classes and upgrade your skills, etc.

Post-graduate classes are required by most states to maintain a credential. Teachers often use summer to take these required classes, which are paid for out of the teacher’s pocket. This means that teachers are not getting paid, but are spending extra money to be able to maintain the requirements of their jobs. This is a benefit?

Any way you look at it, getting that much time off every year is a MAJOR benefit, and has to be factored in to any salary discussions.

Is seasonal unemployment a benefit for highway workers who lose work in the winter? Migrant farm workers? Builders who lose weeks to spring storms? Farmers? Of course not. Unemployment means you don’t work and you don’t get paid. This is not a benefit.

Tennessee Ben and Sam Stone:

1. I agree. Some teachers are grossly overpaid given the quality of their work. We should get rid of them, and replace them with better people. And we should pay these better teachers more.

2. I favor merit pay when there is a valid, objective way to measure merit. A typical salary schedule includes two kinds of merit pay that are entirely objective: years of experience and level of education. However, we also need a way to reward excellence in teaching, but the question is how do you measure it? Observation by principals is certainly valid, and it can be somewhat objective, but for the most part it is a judgement of quality made by one person about another, and thus is subject to personal bias and school politics.

3. Standardized tests are objective, but most current tests are not valid measures of teaching effectiveness because they are all norm-referenced tests, and are not aligned with the curriculum. If someone were to develop a standardized test that was criterion-referenced, and which was tied to the specific curricula of a given school district, it would be a valid, objective measure of student achievement. Give me such a test, and I will be happy to champion its use to determine financial rewards.

[BlinkingDuck]

Good morning all!

How do you do quotes? (number 6?)

Number6,

Agreed, make teaching 48 to 50 weeks a year, including prep time and give at least a 25% increase. In order to do this, schools need to get away from having all students having the same time off and maybe some sort of rotating schedule?

I wish I had worked in your school. In mine, it was a secret but commonly known practice to can experienced teachers and hire less experienced ones for less money. I hope this practice is not as common as I think it is.

Merit pay. Great idea but hard to implement. Not impossible, but hard. One of the main problems is that the administrators that I am used to were more interested in establishing and maintaining little empires and would give the ‘merit’ pay to teachers most subserviant.

Administrators are tough to understand for many people. If they were good teachers, why would they want to leave the classroom? In private industry, managers seem very involved in the success of their company and wish to see that you are at least somewhat happy. School administrators like to RULE their empire and apply a heavy hand treating you like you don’t have a brain or an informed opinion.

This seems so universal that after I left teaching I met a school administrator and became friends. I finally had to ask him "Does the admin job make the person an a$$ or are a$$es attracted to that position. He informed me that in grad training, they are taught to keep the teachers down and are trained to treat them like I have experienced.

hmmmm…

Blink

[Sam_Stone]

I agree that market forces should be allowed to work. It won’t be that simple because schools will just hire anyone and let them stand in the classroom. Market forces need to be allowed to work WITH QUALIFIED TEACHERS ONLY. If schools can’t just hire anybody (emergency acts or whatever), teacher salaries will move up. They HAVE to because they need to hire teachers or no school!

Except that the government controls the allocation of resources. Given a fixed budget for teachers, increasing the standards for teachers will result in one thing only: Shortages. Basic law of supply and demand. You alluded to that when you said that salaries HAVE to go up. I agree, but first you have to fix the problem of a fixed budget. Given the fixed budget, if some salaries go up, then by necessity some have to go down.

Teacher standards should be raised so that a math teacher actually has a math degree for heavens sake! I have seen masters of math education people who have never taken a junior level undergraduate MATH course! Pathetic. This will increase teacher quality and create more teacher demand by weeding out low quality raw material.

While I agree with the sentiment, in practice it’s not so easy.

We agree that there is a shortages of quality teachers. We also agree that, A) the standards for education degrees are too lax, and B) teachers make too little money. The problem is, these things are all inter-related. If you change the standards in education without raising salaries, you’ll reduce the supply of teachers. If you raise salaries without raising standards, you’ll get a glut of poorly educated teachers.

That said, I agree, school should be year round. But if you increase a teachers’ working year from 40 weeks to 48 weeks (a 20% increase) you should be prepared to give them a 20% increase in compensation.

Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve said before that it’s only right to pay teachers less when they work 2 months of the year less than everyone else. But what does that help select out? People who would rather trade income for time off. And those are generally not your best performing people. Exceptions exist of course, and plenty of them. But in general, the most highly motivated people would rather work and be paid than not work.

Who gets raises and how big they are is determined by a set salary schedule. The salary schedule is set up by the superintendant and financial officers of the school district, in negotiation with the teachers’ union in states that have teachers’ unions. That said, evaluations do have an effect on which teachers get tenure, and which do not.

Why, exactly, do grade school teachers need tenure? I understand the justification in University - tenure is to protect academics who might otherwise avoid controversial subjects. Why do teachers, who don’t do research and who follow a standard curriculum, need tenure? Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Does the existance of tenure attract people who like the idea of being in a job that’s almost impossible to be fired from?

Besides, it isn’t necessary to get rid of teachers to create openings because half of all teachers leave the profession at about the 4th or 5th year, often to take a higher-paying job. How do we keep them? Pay them more.

But you can’t pay them ALL more, because it would bust the budget. And anyway, I think average teacher salaries are high enough in many districts. The problem is that the bad ones make too much, and the good ones don’t make enough. The same can be said of most state-run enterprises, which suffer from the same problems.

quote:

You can’t get away from the fact that teachers get the summer off. That should make a big difference in salary. If a teacher gets paid $35,000 for 9 months work, that’s an equivalent annual salary of $46,000.

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1. 10 months of work. I’ve worked for three different districts, always on a 10-month contract. This does not take into account the two weeks of my own time that it takes to prepare for the school year.

Okay, 10 months. Still, a teacher’s salary should at least be 1/6 less than that of an equivalent occupation. Or to be fair, perhaps 10% less, accounting for the fact that other jobs come with paid holidays too.

But don’t forget that in addition to the summer vacation, you get extra time at Christmas as well. My friend teaching in college actually gets almost 3 weeks off at Christmas, plus three full months in the summer. But grade school isn’t quite as generous as college. How much time off for Christmas do teachers get? How about other time off? When I was in school, I remember that there was a ‘teacher convention’ holiday in February that got us four or five days off, plus an afternoon every month for teachers to do other school related paperwork.

And, most teachers work a shorter work day than the average, do they not? And yes, they have to mark papers and engage in extra-curricular activities, but then most professional occupations require a lot more work than just the 9-5 office hours. For instance, after I log off here tonight I will be studying software manuals for a couple of hours, then catching up on some statistics updating for a management project. Tax accountants often put in a month of straight 16-hour days around tax time. Lawyers and doctors put in tons of extra time as well.

And of course, without merit pay there is nothing stopping a teacher from teaching on ‘auto-pilot’, using course materials developed long ago, using classroom time to mark papers rather than talking to students, and avoiding all extra-curricular responsibilities.

2. My district pays roughly $2700 for summer school, so if you want to figure “equivilent annual salary” it comes to $37,700 per year for a teacher who teaches the whole year.

That may or may not be a valid comparison. Just because they offer $2700 for summer school does not mean that that is fair compensation, or a fair comparison to other jobs.

[/quote]

3. Unemployment is unemployment. It doesn’t magically make the money you earned while you were working worth more. In my district, there are always more teachers who apply for summer-school than there are openings. This is not a vacation, this is being unemployed because there is no work available.

[/quote]

It’s not unemployment. If you don’t believe me, go and try to claim unemployment insurance. It’s a scheduled leave without pay, if anything. And you DO benefit from it. If not, then why don’t you volunteer to work those two months for free?

If you agree that the time off has value, then you have to factor it into any salary considerations.

4. As I said above, I am fully in favor of making the regular school-year year round (lengthen it by about 20%). But it should be accompanied by an equivilent increase in salary.

Sure. So what would you do with the extra two months? Keep the same kids in school longer, teach different kids? If you’re teaching different kids, then we can raise teacher’s salary without increasing the per-student budget.

I’m not convinced that kids should spend the whole year in school. There are valid developmental reasons to give kids the summer off.

quote:

And don’t forget that even if you aren’t working during those months, you’re saving on all the work-related expenses (transportation, clothing, meals, etc).

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Food and clothing become less expensive when you’re unemployed? Wow! Personally, my meals and clothes cost just as much regardless of whether I’m working. You’ve got me on the transportation, though. I could save a good $50 per month on transportaion if I din’t have to drive to work
for the two months in the summer. But then I’d lose the $2700 I’d make teaching summer school. Not much of a trade-off.

Work related expenses are significant. Ask the IRS. I used to be self-employed, and could deduct things like clothes, etc. Think about it - do you buy meals at work? How much more do you spend than if you ate at home? Forget just gas for your car, what about insurance, maintenance, wear, etc? If you live close to the school and still need a car, that might be insignificant. But if you’re a second income earner in a two-income household with two cars, then during those months off you can de-insure the second car, and for many people the drive is far enough that parking the car for two months will save considerably in wear and tear and maintenance.

Clothing can be a small item, or large. For my wife, who must dress professionally, getting a couple of months off would probably save her $200-$400 in clothes, nylons that wear out, etc.

quote:

And, during those three months you can do work around the home that others would have to pay for, you can take summer classes and upgrade your skills, etc.

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Post-graduate classes are required by most states to maintain a credential. Teachers often use summer to take these required classes, which are paid for out of the teacher’s pocket. This means that teachers are not getting paid, but are spending extra money to be able to maintain the requirements of their jobs. This is a benefit?

Of course it is, if the alternative is to have to take time off without pay or take evening classes in addition to working, like the rest of us have to. If I want to maintain my professional credentials in software development, I have to take about 150 hours a year of additional training. I’m lucky - my company pays tuition for professional development, but many companies don’t.

Is seasonal unemployment a benefit for highway workers who lose work in the winter? Migrant farm workers? Builders who lose weeks to spring storms? Farmers? Of course not. Unemployment means you don’t work and you don’t get paid. This is not a benefit.

Of course it’s a benefit, if you’re getting a full year’s pay for 10 months of work (and remember, we’re comparing the teacher’s salaries against other occupations that DO work the full year. So we’re assuming that a teacher’s salary is in fact a full year’s pay).

I know guys who go up north in the summer to do oil field work. They make about $30,000 for the summer, which is great pay. A lot of these guys then take the winter off and have a big party. Other guys go and get local construction work for the winter at a much lower pay, but with the summer work added their annual salaries are quite high.

Anyway you cut it, getting time off is a benefit. How much it’s worth is another question. One last point: If you think it’s not a benefit, how would you feel if the school system told you that you were now going to be working all 12 months with no increase in pay? How can you argue against that, if the time off isn’t worth anything?

2. I favor merit pay when there is a valid, objective way to measure merit. A typical salary schedule includes two kinds of merit pay that are entirely objective: years of experience and level of education.

Neither of those have anything to do with merit. Those two items are typically the only places where unions will budge from their egalitarian viewpoint. But the world is full of lousy teachers who have been lousy teachers for 30 years, and having a higher degree doesn’t ensure anything.

However, we also need a way to reward excellence in teaching, but the question is how do you measure it? Observation by principals is certainly valid, and it can be somewhat objective, but for the most part it is a judgement of quality made by one person about another, and thus is subject to personal bias and school politics.

You mean, just like every other job in the world? I get evaluations every year, and I guarantee you that my evaluation is every bit as subjective as a teacher’s would be. In fact, because there is far more measurement in school, it’s probably easier to quantify good teaching.

How do you measure the ‘worth’ of a programmer? Lines of code produced? Nope. The best programmers get the hardest problems, so they generally produce less lines of code than the weaker ones. Education? Nope. We have guys with Masters degrees in our company lagging behind guys with no formal education at all.

What it comes down to is the professional opinion of your manager. And HIS neck is on the line if he promotes someone who doesn’t deserve it. So he pays attention. And over time, you can learn which people pull their weight, and which ones can’t. You get a sense of competance. You pick up on who has a work ethic and who doesn’t. It’s all very subjective, and it works.

At my company (GE, the largest company in the world), employees are ranked A,B, and C. The A’s get big annual raises, bonuses, first cracks at relocation and new positions, the latest computers, offices, etc. The B’s get decent raises and lots of help moving up to ‘A’ status in the form of training, counselling, whatever they want. The C’s get told that they had better become B’s or A’s. And in the meantime they won’t even get cost of living increases.

This puts a fair bit of pressure on everyone in the company to continually perform. And it’s one small reason among many why GE is widely considered to be the best-managed company in the world. I know from personal experience how many things I’ve done because of that pressure, all voluntary, and all worthwhile both for the company and my own development. I’m not sure I’d be quite so driven if it didn’t matter. And I know a lot of guys who wouldn’t give a damn about the job if they knew they are getting paid the same regardless of how well they perform.

The benefit of merit-based employment is so obvious to me that it baffles me when people tell me that it’s no big deal that teachers are all treated the same.

[Kaitlyn]

Blinking Duck, it has been a pleasure debating with you. I respect you because, despite our differences, we were able to maintain a civil discourse without name-calling or impuning an entire profession, something Sam Stone has been unable to do, as is evident by his statement quoted at the end of this post.

Sam Stone

1. Teachers get 10 month’s pay for 10 month’s work. It is not a year’s pay for 10 month’s work. But if you want to compare a year’s pay to a year’s, it’s quite simple. Teachers who teach summer school do a full year’s work, and their total pay is a full year’s pay. In the example given in the OP, a full year’s pay would amount to $37,700.

2. Unemployment: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Unemployed persons are:

All persons who were not classified as employed during the survey reference week, made specific active efforts to find a job during the prior 4 weeks, and were available for work.

All persons who were not working and were waiting to be called back to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off.

According to the second defenition, teachers are unemployed during the summer.

As to whether time off in the summer is a benefit, it is a benefit only for those who want time off. For teachers who want to work in the summer, but cannot because the school is closed and there are not enough summer school positions available, it is not.

3. Probationary teachers can be dismissed without cause. Tenured teachers are entitled to due process. That’s why elementary school teachers need tenure.

4. Work day: A teacher typically works 8:00 to 3:30. Subtract the 30 minute lunch and you get 7 hours on the clock. Nine to five workers typically get an hour lunch, subtract that and you get 7 hours on the clock.

5. Year-round schools: These exist in small numbers all over the country. Students attend school on a rotating schedule, usually 6 weeks on, 2 weeks off.

6. Experience has a huge impact on being an effective teacher. Teachers are almost without exception much better their 5th year than they are their 1st.

7. I never said that teachers shouldn’t be evaluated by supervisors. I have written that I believe that is a valid method of evaluation, and that making such evaluations is in fact part of my job. I did point out that such evaluations are by their very nature subjective, so an objective measurement should also be used. I don’t think that the standardized tests currently used are valid for this purpose for reasons already stated.

Sam Stone said

the world is full of lousy teachers who have been lousy teachers for 30 years

A blanket condemnation of an entire profession undermines any reasoned argument you might make, and reveals an open hostility. Such insults belong in the pit.

Anyone who beleives that “the world is full of lousy teachers” is not going to be convinced by any argument or evidence to the contrary, so I will not try.

I will be happy to debate the issues in this thread with anyone who is willing to do so with an open mind.

[Sam_Stone]

You misunderstood. I was applying Sturgeon’s law - EVERY profession is full of bad practitioners - good people are rare everywhere. It’s just that other professions have mechanisms for rewarding the good ones, and therefore have a better chance of keeping them.

[Kaitlyn]

Thanks for the clarification. My last post still applies, though. Anyone who has decided ahead of time that “90% of everything is crud.” (Sturgeon’s Law) is a cynic who won’t be convinced by any argument.

That said, we did agree on some important points:

1. Good teachers don’t make enough money.

2. We should get rid of bad teachers (which, according to Sturgeon’s Law, would be 90% of them)

3. Standards and salaries should be linked. Raising one without the raising the other would be a mistake.

Beyond that, any I don’t think any further discussion would change either of our minds, so I think we have reached the dead horse stage of the discussion. I respect your veiws, and you express them well. I just happen to disagree with them. Strongly.

[Askia]

(Cough, cough) May I say a word?

As a first year teacher entering the profession in South Carolina – not quite ranked as low in average teacher pay as North Dakota but not out of the lower forty-eight contiguous states, either – I have to say that I’m utterly biased in my belief in that teacher pay for beginning teachers is overwhelmingly inadequate commensurate to our typical duties, professional standards, everyday responsibilities and community expectations. You’re expected to start off hard, hit the ground running, and perform as masterfully as a full-time experienced teacher.

We work with children, teenagers and young adults, daily. Teaching, cajoling, comforting, advising, guiding and standing forth as moral role models. We deal with behavioral and sociological problems, disabilities like Attention Deficit Disorder and battle illiteracy in a country where many homes have fewer than 50 books. We deal with interoffice politics, gossip, scandal and rumor on par with any major. We keep confidential information, like journalists, lawyers, the cops and doctors.

Pay is poor. Materials are scarce. The stress, the burnout, the looming spectre of ‘I might get sued’ and ‘guns in schools’ are intensely real. Add to that the problems of our profession having more in common with a trade organization than a true profession and the sudden realization when you’re shopping for supplies that – yeah, that you make more money selling teacher supplies than being in a classroom, and you have a recipe for career frustration.

The above debators have offered reams of back-and-forth discussion on whether or not a 10-month workyear is ‘really’ the same as a 12-month year – blah, blah, blah…

My solution is simple. Forget raising teachers salaries. As long as the general public has to be presuaded to vote to raise their own taxes to pay for our liveilhood, I don’t see significant raises happening anywhere in this country. BUT. I would happily work at the salary I have now if I didn’t pay as much as everyone else for all I need in services, food, gas, utilities, housing, etc.

That’s right! Instead of coughing up more public dollars to pay us more, encourage private industries and public utilities in the cities that WANT good teachers to offer a dazzling array of tax breaks, discounts and incentives so that we – fully certified teachers – end up paying less. Make a basic “community discount package” available immediately to lure teachers in would work well for all in the field. Link special incentives with the idea of merit pay and NATIONAL certification and you’ll have top-flight teachers beating a path to your door. EVERYONE loves a bargain.

Subsidized housing for teachers in high-cost areas like the San Francisco Bay Area? Sign me up in a second.

Half-rent and utilities in rural communities in the south? I’d consider it.

There are programs where teachers can purchase homes at 50% off. Offer me the home of my dreams in your city after, say, six years continous service and I’ll sign any contract you want.

Teachers eat out at 15% off? Get books at bookstores at 25% off? Buy clothes in the fall and spring for 30%? Use copy shops at an addition 10% off? These incentives can be found in certain cities, but I’m looking for something organized, large-scale and marketed to current and prospective teachers.

[Kaitlyn]

Asia: You’ll get no argument from me. You missed one, though. In California, teachers get a tax credit (not a tax deduction, a tax credit) for working in the state for a set number of years, culminating in $1500 for those who teach in the state long enough. Many of the incentives you suggest, especially those that pertain to home buying, are already available as “perks” to other professions. The 1/2 price houses you referred to are, I think, in Massachusetts, but are very hard to come by.

But I’m with you. I’d also suggest many of the same accommodations for nurses.

[Askia]

I wasn’t aware of the California tax credit. Thanks for mentioning it. But while $1,500 is a drop in the bucket compared to living costs out there, and I hope they increase the credit, every lil’ bit helps.

No disrespect intended to nurses or other hardworking members of other professions, but I’d rather be a proponent of educational perks first. As far as I’m aware there is no wide-scale nursing shortage reaching crisis proportions, no incremental increase in nursing “standards” without commensurate pay increases, and they don’t put just any college graduate in hospitals to NURSE after giving them a crash course in medicine.

I’m trying not to get cynical starting out, but it’s very easy to get that way – especially compared to my peers doing well in other fields.

[BlinkingDuck]

Askia Hale,

NO!!!

I hate to invoke ‘slippery slope’ logic, since I think it is overused, but here it is.

If you subsidize teachers, which is what you are proposing, then what is to stop hoards of other professions from doing the same thing. Nurses, librarians, social workers, yadda yadda. What makes teaching so special that they get the special consideration of other groups?

You run the risk of chaos and adding another inefficient layer of government to oversee it. Society will constantly have to battle groups of people wanting to be subsidized while taxes keep going higher. You then have huge animosity between people in that you get subsidized but I don’t and nobody feels that their job is less important than another. For example, have you ever met anyone who feels they should be paid less than a teacher? It doesn’t matter what they do, even shoveling crap, they feel they should be paid more than a teacher. Imagine having many groups subsidized.

Maybe it would be good. It would sure fuel anti-tax sentiment! It would be like putting dynamite in the fire. What would you do if people refused to raise taxes to pay? Force them?

Also, what is the difference between paying teachers more and giving them subsidized housing and other things? Why not just pay them more? It is still money being paid. I just think it is more efficient and honest to pay them (or not pay them) directly.

I am leery of professions that consider themselves important but undervalued. I grew up in farm country and they were convinced that they were so special that taxpayers should bulldoze them tons of money. Rally cries of ‘save the family farm’ and such. Funny, I never heard the farmers start a compaign of ‘save the family pizza place’ when big chains started taking them over. I don’t see the difference.
Blink